


level-headed

by joking_motive



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: mentions julie/frank as having dated in the past, mostly just legion meta?, uhhh 2 people get stabbed. uh oh sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-05
Updated: 2019-05-05
Packaged: 2020-02-26 11:33:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18716209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joking_motive/pseuds/joking_motive
Summary: There were three times Julie lost her cool, and all of them involved Frank god damn Morrison.





	level-headed

Julie always claimed she had a good head on her shoulders. She figured that no matter what happened, she’d always be the cool, calm, and collected type, and there were only a few exceptions in which she was proven wrong.

The first of these times was meeting Frank. He wasn’t radiant or drop-dead gorgeous by any means, but what he was good at was talking. Whenever he started explaining something, it just made so much  _ sense _ . Julie swore, Frank could tell her that day was night and hot was cold, and she’d at least briefly consider it for a moment. And man, she could listen to him talk hours on end about his philosophies and opinions. Before she knew it, she had fallen head-over-heels for this guy, this guy who randomly walked into a classmate’s houseparty, this guy who she’d never seen before in her life. He was unreal, and after the first conversation there was more. There was a  _ lot _ more. Phone calls, hanging out, and little glances that turned into dates, flirting, and physical intimacy. Frank had baited out a chase for his heart and she took it with everything she had. Maybe she should’ve spotted the warning signs sooner, what with her cool-headed collectedness, but she didn’t. She joined his gang. She roped in Susie when Frank said they needed another member. She gave her all for every crime they committed because she thought they saw eye-to-eye.

The second time was the incident with the cleaner, what got them all into this mess. At first, she rolled her eyes when Frank had dared Joey about vandalizing the store. Joey was a show-off, and any attempt to show up Frank, he’d take. Later that day, she had gotten a call from Frank about it.

“Joe’s gonna fuck it up.” Frank had said this bitterly to her over the line.

“So?” Julie raised an eyebrow that Frank would never see. “If he fucks it up, it’s not our fault.”

“If Joe fucks it up, then we’re down a member of The Legion.” Frank hissed back. “We’re going together.”

And that was that. That evening, they hopped in through a window in the break room, Joey leading them around. Julie noticed Susie get jittery. This wasn’t the first time she had; poor girl’s heart wasn’t built for crime, but Julie had figured her best friend would get used to it eventually. She had, after all.

“I’ve just got a bad feeling, that’s all.” Susie had whispered to her, careful to be out of earshot from Frank and Joey.

“We’ll just wreck the shelves, steal some gum and cigs, and jet.” Julie reassured her. “Besides, Joe said no one would be here. Store’s closed.” That’s what Joey had told them. This was all planned out and nothing bad was going to happen. Everyone put their masks down.

Except something did happen. She had been plucking and examining some tacky sunglasses off a shelf near the back, and dropping those she didn’t like and grinding them into the ground with her heel, when she noticed some sort of rustling. She figured it was Frank, probably about to jump out from behind another shelf and surprise her with something dumb he found (One time, the time with the jewelry store, he came up to her with a pendant and said “It’s a jewel, Jules!”, and she didn’t stop thinking about it for the rest of the day).

Instead, an older man in janitor’s gear had jumped out and tackled her to the ground, causing her to drop her knife in the process. As they both wrestled to gain possession of the knife, Julie quickly noted that there’d be no way she’d win this fight. Panicked, she called out for Frank.

And running Frank came. She heard his footsteps picking up pace in her direction, right as he shoved the cleaner off Julie and drove his knife into his back. At first, Julie was relieved, her panic dissipated, until she saw the red liquid drip from where Frank’s hands were hoisted above the man’s back. They were thieves, vandals, juvenile delinquents sure, but never resulted to murder. The knives, as Frank had once told them, were for the most part just for show. Now, Frank, slowly turned around, the other two members of Legion gathering around the couple.

“Finish the job. We’re the Legion. We’re in this together, ‘till the end.” 

Whoever that was on that day, who stared them down and made all of them stab that man and forced Susie’s hands when she refused, who had them clean up any trace that the murder had taken place, who rode in the passenger’s seat of Joey’s car as they drove up to Mount Ormond, who had them all bury the body before walking off into the Fog, that wasn’t the Frank she knew.

The third time was once they had already been in the Entity’s realm. They’d all gotten into the swing of this thing. Chase down the survivor, slice at them until they fall, and then hoist them on the dirty hooks that littered whatever setting they had been dropped into. It was a rhythm that Julie had fallen into relatively quickly, becoming desensitized to the violence, and reverting back to her calm and collected persona. Somehow, in retrospect, killing the cleaner had felt less… impactful, less serious. Now murder was just part of the job, no longer overstepping the seemingly-arbitrary bounds they’d set when they’d established the Legion. Sometimes the Entity would send them to Mount Ormond, their former hideout and where they stashed the cleaner’s body. It was unchanging, no matter how many times survivors had dropped wooden pallets or bled in the lodge, it always reverted back into their old stomping ground. Sometimes she was half-tempted to try and dig where they’d buried the body, just to confirm that everything that happened wasn’t something her brain made up in a haze.

She and Frank had grown a tad distant. They weren’t fighting or angry at each other, just apathetic towards each other’s company. Maybe they were falling out of love? The longer she stayed here, the more convinced she became that love just wasn’t possible in this place. She’d lost any sort of passion she’d previously had towards anything at all, just slowly morphing into some empty husk of her former self. Still, she did find some fun in the little things. Some of the other killers she found in her company were absolute hoots to hang out around, whether it was the pig-mask girl and her irritability, the rabbit-masked woman and her “fun mom” vibes, or the guy who didn’t articulate a lot but made the good chili (she hadn’t ever asked what was in it, mostly figuring he’d do that chef thing where he’d get all defensive about giving away his secret), everyone around here seemed to be incredibly intriguing.

This time though, she had chosen to hang out with Susie. The two were throwing rocks at some of the crows resting in Mount Ormond for fun.

“How’s this place treating you, Susie?” Drat, another miss for her. She picked up a pebble and gave it to the pink-haired girl.

“Um, well, I think…? I dunno how to take in some of this stuff. It’s like a really long episode of Twin Peaks.” Susie nonchalantly flicked her wrist, only hitting the base of the tree where the crow was perched, causing it to squawk and fly off. “I guess we don’t really need to eat or sleep, so that’s good. … But there’s not a whole lot to do.”

“True, but we make our own fun.” Julie smiled at her best friend before picking up another pebble and wiping the snow off of it. “... I mean. Sucks ass that there’s no mall or anything, but if we stayed behind, we’d be in jail for the next half of our lives.” This caused Susie to frown.

“... If we hadn’t killed the janitor…” She started.

“Sue. Stop.” Julie stopped her wind-up to turn to her. “It’s in the past. Forget about it.”

“But it was  _ wrong _ , Jules! We killed a person in cold blood!”

“Look around, Susie!  _ All _ these people are here because they killed people! Some of ‘em killed dozens!”

“Hey.” Suddenly, a different voice spoke up from behind a pile of snow. “Didn’t mean to intrude on girl-talk, but I overheard something kinda interesting.” Frank, unmasked like the both of them, strolled over casually.

“No trial?” Julie asked.

“No trial. Joe’s up to bat at the moment.” He shrugged, and walked over to Susie, putting an arm around her.

“Hey Frank.” Susie said quietly. Any sort of intensity her face had before was completely drained as she avoided eye-contact with their leader entirely.

“Hey Sue.” He said, smiling at her. “So, y’know, I’m taking a stroll down memory lane, yeah? Just touring Mount Ormond post godawful crime. Nice place, despite the history. Has our sick mural that artist metalhead dude did. He’s here by the way, poor guy.”

“Oh.” Was all the girl with the braces said. What was Frank getting at? When he talked around an issue like this, it was always to pad it sarcastically in preparation for his angry blow-up at the end.

“And, well, Sue, you might not believe it, but what I heard was  _ someone _ was all, ‘hey, I think we shouldn’t have killed the cleaner guy, actually’. Well, that  _ might’ve _ been what they said, but I got a brain. You see, that’s actually coward-speak for ‘I’m not willing to follow through with what my gang started’. And like, that really hurt me, personally, ‘cause I thought we were all  _ super _ tight pals.”

“Knock it off, Frank.” Julie said, not really all that forcefully though. “It was just a what-if. Nothing serious.”

“Oh. Oohhhh! You all were just kiddin’, huh Susie? My bad, I actually took it seriously! You’ll forgive me, right?”

“Uh, yeah…?” Poor Susie was completely miffed by how this conversation was proceeding.

“Good.” Frank grinned sinisterly, before shoving Susie down on the snow. “‘Kidding’ my ass. I always knew you were a weak fucking link in this group.” The girl’s eyes looked up at Frank frantically as the leader of the Legion pulled out his knife, toying with it.

“Not funny.” Julie glared at him.  _ The knives were only for intimidation _ . Those empty words cycled through her head once more.

“Good, ‘cause I’m through with jokes.” He then lunged for the girl’s leg, his knife digging through her tights and into soft flesh. Susie bit down on the hood of her jacket to prevent from screaming as the blood oozed out. “You know, the survivors always come back, no matter how hard we stab them or how many times we impale them with the hook. So I wondered. What happens if a  _ killer _ gets brutally stabbed or impaled with a hook? So nice of you to volunteer for science, Sue.” He ripped the knife out of Susie’s leg, a trail of blood hanging off of his knife as it swept up through the air, before going to swing right back down into the girl’s neck.

Only to be stopped when Julie threw herself at him, tackling them both to the ground with her on top, holding her own blade at his throat.

“Don’t.”  _ What am I doing? _ “Don’t touch a hair on her head, Morrison.”

“Calm down, Jules. It was only for intimidation. I wasn’t gonna kill her.” His mouth spoke those words, yes, but she had seen the sadism in his eyes.

“Leave.”

“What?” An opportunity to back out had just presented itself.

“I said leave, you dense idiot.” She had went the other direction entirely. “You have no fucking right to treat her like that. Let her be.”

“... Fine, bitch. Let me up.” Julie moved off of him slowly, purposely standing in between him and Susie when she stood up, making no effort to help him. After an extended glare at the two, he stalked off, clearly in a huff.

“I… thank you…” Susie had only just stood up herself, wincing when she put any amount of weight on her leg. “I really thought he was gonna kill me.”

“Don’t thank me. You would’ve done the same.”  _ Why did I do that? _ She had a theory.

Susie had been her friend since the beginning. Though their personalities seemed to deviate entirely, she still felt an urge to protect the shy, naive girl from the world at large. When Susie first showed her her “knife”, the broken ruler, she realized just who she was roping into a hobby of dangerous crime. She’d only mentioned bringing the kind-hearted girl to Frank merely because they were friends and already hung out all the time, not at all thinking through the consequences. When she broke it all down, she was the core reason why Susie had to kill the janitor, why Susie had to be abducted into the Entity’s realm, far from her other friends and family. She couldn’t help but feel a pang of guilt when the realization dawned on her.

“I dunno, Jules. I… I’m  _ terrified  _ of Frank.” Julie thought back to when Frank first stabbed the cleaner, and saw nothing behind his eyes. About the actual, literal minutes ago where he almost murdered her best friend right in front of her.

“I am too.”

**Author's Note:**

> i'm posting this at 1am when i'm tired enough that my brain doesn't have the power to get embarrassed at what i wrote.
> 
> so, a few reasons for why this came about: julie's easily the legion member in the backstory with the least personality, so to speak. we know joey's an impulsive show-off, frank's a hoe, and susie's nice and sweet and doesn't like murder (but was surprisingly down to clown with freakin vandalism and bullying apparently). we're told julie's pretty and easily manipulated and that's about it. oh, and her mixtape is emo music. i'm a huge fan of that, personally.  
> and THEN there was the question of "do they all still get along in the fog?" to which i was like "well, if anyone has a problem with frank, then it's probably susie" (although the model under the mask has her smiling whereas everyone else's expressions are vacant-- i'd wager in canon she probably got used to all the Murder). then my friend was like "julie dumped frank for susie" nd i said "Yeah,".  
> so uh, this happened. shoutout to a certain someone for kicking me in the pants and getting me to write again. and thanks for reading!


End file.
